For two and a half hours of frothy fun escapist entertainment, the Jimmy Buffett jukebox musical romcom Escape To Margaritaville (playing this week at the Segerstrom Center For The Arts) can’t be beat.

Indeed, if there were ever a musical designed to get an audience smiling widely, laughing out loud, and and lip-synching along to hit after hit, Escape To Margaritaville is that musical, so cleverly written around Jimmy Buffett’s Greatest Hits, so vibrantly designed in saturated tropical colors, and so filled with phenomenally talented “pre-Equity” triple-threats (almost all of them playing their own age or close to it) that if you go just looking to have fun, you won’t be a bit disappointed.

Book writers Greg Garcia and Mike O’Malley take as their point of departure singer-songwriter Buffett’s 1977 smash “Margaritaville” (“Wasted away again in Margaritaville, searchin’ for my lost shaker of salt, some people claim that there’s a woman to blame, but I know, it’s my own damn fault.”), and confection from it the tale of a womanizing young bar singer at a Caribbean resort not coincidentally called Margaritaville who ends Act One blaming himself for the romantic disaster his life has turned out to be.

You don’t have to be a romcom fan to determine from the get-go who’ll end up coupled just in time for curtain calls.

It’s the getting there that provides the fun, beginning with the aforementioned singer Tully (Chris Clark), who’s more than happy to seduce a new female guest each week under the bemused eye of best bud Brick (Peter Michael Jordan).

Then comes the arrival of attractive young environmentalist Rachel (Sarah Hinrichsen), vacationing on the island with her about-to-be-wed-to-a-jerk bestie Tammy (Shelly Lynn Walsh), and from moment Tully and Rachel lock eyes, there’s not an iota of doubt that the mismatched duo will end up happily ever after just in time for a “Margaritaville” reprise, Act Two hurdles be damned.

Escape To Margaritaville surrounds its appealing quartet of leads with more than a few colorful supporting players, including island busboy Jamal (Matthew James Sharrod), Latino hottie Jesus (Diego Alejando González) pronounced Hey-Soos, and most significantly 70something beach bum J.D. (Patrick Cogan) and the sassy Margaritaville owner (Rachel Lyn Fobbs as Marley) he’d like nothing better than to “get drunk and screw.” (Lyricist Buffett’s immortal words, not mine.)

Other Buffett gems inspiring Escape To Margaritaville’s wisp of a plot are cocktail-hour ode “It’s Five O’Clock Somewhere”; “Three Chords,” that has Tully teaching Rachel to strum a guitar; “Volcano” (“I don’t know where I’m a gonna go when the volcano blow”); and a couple more that serve as characters’ back stories, “Son Of A Son Of A Sailor” (Tully’s) and “He Went To Paris” (J.D.’s).

All of this adds up to what some might call fluff but what I call a musical I’d gladly see again and again. (Regional, college, and community theaters take note.)

It helps enormously to have Amy Anders Corcoran (assistant director to the Broadway production’s Christopher Ashley) in charge of Margaritaville On Tour, and Broadway associate choreographer Andrew Turteltaub on hand to keep Kelly Devine’s dance moves–from calypso to conga to an out-of-the-blue fantasy tap sequence that earns deserved cheers–as fresh and lively as can be.

It helps too that a cast of mostly recent university BFA grads matches their more seasoned Equity counterparts, beginning with Margaritaville’s Broadway-bound pair of leads.

Audiences could not ask for a handsomer, hunkier, more appealing leading man than Clark, who can sing up a storm and play a mean guitar to boot, or captivating Upland-born OSHA grad Hinrichsen, showing off statuesque girl-next-door appeal and powerhouse vocals for the home crowd.

Walsh and Jordan (both terrific) ignite their own romantic sparks as zesty Tammy and big-hearted Brick, and though Fobbs is a couple decades younger than Marley is written, she invests the part with abundant island spice opposite a delightful, appropriately grizzled Hogan, and Sharrod, González, and Noah Bridgestock (as sleazeball Chadd) do winning work as well.

Last but not least, here’s no more talented singing-dancing ensemble in town than Sophie Braud, Devon Buchanan, Anthony Cataldo, Chantelle Cognevich, Katie Davis, Fabian-Joubert Gallmeister, Bobby Hogan, dance captain Aimee Lane, Michael Matthew Sakelos, Trent Soyster, Emma Stricker, Jade Turner, and Morgan Unger, with swings Victoria Price and Tyler Whitaker poised to step into ensemble tracks at a moment’s notice.

Vibrant tropical hues abound in Escape To Margaritaville’s supremely eye-catching production design (scenic design by Walt Spangler, costumes by Paul Tazewell; lighting by Howell Binkley and Amanda Zieve, and hair, wig, and makeup design by Leah J. Loukas).

Sound designers Brian Ronan and Craig Cassidy, musical director Andrew David Sotomayor, and an ab-fab onstage band make Jimmy Buffett sound even more calipso-licious.

There’s nothing dark, edgy, or revolutionary about a show that owes more to Mamma Mia! than to Dear Evan Hansen, Fun Home, or Hamilton. In other words, Escape To Margaritaville is precisely what the entertainment doctor ordered in these increasingly fraught and divisive times. I for one had a tropical beach ball!

Segerstrom Center For The Arts, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa.
www.scfta.org

–Steven Stanley
February 4, 2020
Photos: Matthew Murphy

Tags: Greg Garcia, Jimmy Buffett, Mike O'Malley, Orange County Theater Review, Segerstrom Center For The Arts